Introducing the series, music historian József Ujfalussy saw the natural course of all scholarly work including “publication of partial findings, collation with other findings and views, and resulting fruitful debate. The forums for this flow and exchange of views are journals.” The Institute of Musicology sought to remedy the lack of such a forum with volumes of studies that became a regular series. The yearbook became a place to announce findings and partial results in Hungarian musicology and debate these. By presenting often the first, most direct accounts in various fields, it charts the research in the Institute of Musicology over a period of some forty years.

Apart from such day-to-day partial findings, the series undertook to include the materials of occasional conferences. Although it has rested mainly on the contributions of researchers at the Institute of Musicology, it sometimes extended this sphere, and articles by foreign authors have appeared regularly in recent years. Although the nature of the series means it generally develops spontaneously, the series includes some thematic volumes, e. g. those in honour of László Somfai and László Dobszay, or the 2012 number marking the 35th anniversary of the series, which concerned the history of research and collection. The present volume seeks to celebrate the widest spectrum of research to mark the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the Institute.

The Tract is one of the few Gregorian genres not regularly presented iwith Tropes (furnished with inserts of text and music). That is one reason why it is surprising to find in the 18th-century gradual of Zagreb University such a Tract supplied with text inserts which is not part of the traditional repertory. According to spare details in the literature and information from available Bohemian, Polish and Hungarian sources, the Tract Laus tibi Christe may have been composed early in the 15th century. Having presented the sources, the lecture sums up its specific melodic and structural traits, its Central European parallels, and its presumed Utraquist links. This late medieval set of liturgical chants, found by chance, sheds light on a group of items unusual and innovative in their textual inserts and musical forms ‒ unique in the Gregorian repertory, although short-lived.

The offices for the late medieval feasts, as additions to the classic set, have usually survived in the usage of a region or group. An exception is one that shows awareness of certain office traditions apparent in the final form of the Corpus Christi office (Sacerdos in aeternum), to which the reputation of Thomas Aquinas as an author may have contributed much. The lecture summarizes some five decades of codification of the feast, presents the earliest surviving sources, and shows the stages by which the final office was crystallized. Starting from the literature discussing the versions, it focuses on the sources of a transitional office form (Sapientia aedificavit). Further additions to the decades-long discourse on office variants appear with examination of two more sources of the Sapientia aedificavit cycle: a pair of hitherto unknown 14th-century Zagreb‒Kalocsa sources (H-Bu Clmae 33 and Hr-Zu MR 43), and a late 13th-century Esztergom breviary (Cz-Ps DE I 7).